The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

All the while I was getting a make-shift dinner ready, that last thought of mine kept bothering me like the smell of something burning. So, as soon as dinner was over (I need not have bothered with it; everyone straggled in and straggled out again, without doing any justice to good food. Mrs. Ricker and Martha did not even come down.), I told the Indian girl, whose name was Zinnia, to manage the dishes the best she could, and I went off up to my room.

I took up some dinner on a tray with me, for Mrs. Ricker and for Martha. When Mrs. Ricker opened her door, I managed to get the information that Martha was awake, at last, and that Mrs. Ricker had just been helping her with her bath.

"Is she all right, now? " I questioned.

"I-suppose so. " She edged the door shut, in my face.

I went into my room and combed my hair. I can always think better when I am doing some absolutely unimportant thing like that. But, to-day, it was as if someone had put an egg-beater into my mind, and was beating it to best time. My thoughts whirred, and tossed, and foamed.

Sam's pipe ashes. The key in my pocket. Chad's suicide. Chad's note of confession. Gaby's fear. Mrs. Ricker alone in the house. What it was that Danny knew and dared not tell? Not all plainly, and separately, as they look in writing; but all jumbled, and each one seething with its own details and complications.

Sam's pipe ashes -- Lands alive! What had been the matter with me? Sam was the only member of our household who smoked a pipe, but he was not the only man in creation who did; nor was his the only pipe, I supposed, that had ever dropped and spilled its contents. A very nice and comforting thought, if I could have fooled myself into believing it.

Try as I might, I couldn't keep from thinking that part of Sam's talk was bluff-that is, soon as I got away from him I thought that. Did it mean that he was trying to shield Chad? No. It could not mean that. Besides, Chad himself had surely been trying to shield someone. Sam? Gaby had feared someone, when she had left the house. No woman had ever feared Sam.

Mrs. Ricker had hated Gaby. But, so had John hated Gaby. Mrs. Ricker had said -- John had said --

I jumped to my feet, holding my head in my hands. It seemed to me that the only decent thing I could do, since it held my brainpan, was to wrench the disloyal thing off and sling it away. How dared I think such thoughts of people with whom I had spent the best part of my life? They were the only friends I had in the world. I had never seen one of them do an unkind thing. Never. Mrs. Ricker was as queer as Dick's hatband, but she had always been gentle and patient. She had always been the first to spread crumbs on the snow for the birds in winter. Though, of course, she had said to Hubert Hand -- I was off again.

I could not endure the thinking of such thoughts. I must stop it. I must find work to do; someone to talk to. I ran across my room and pulled open the door, just in time to see Hubert Hand straighten from where he had been stooping to my keyhole.

He brazened it out. "Sorry, Mary. But I guess it will be dog kill dog around here, from now on."

"Hubert Hand," I said, "what I want to know is, why are you listening at my keyhole?"

"I wasn't listening. I was looking, or trying to. This keyhole peering is the bunk, Mary. You might as well cut it out yourself. " With that he turned and walked on down the hall.

I stood watching him, trying to account for an odd sense of relief that had come to me. In a minute I understood. Since he had been at my keyhole, he must have had some suspicion of me, for something. Possibly he had a good reason for that suspicion. As good a reason as I had, for suspicioning Sam, and John, and Mrs. Ricker. He was clear off the track with his suspicion. Probably, I was just as far off with mine.

He turned, quickly, and came back to me. He looked up and down the hall. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. "Mary," he said, "I've gone at this all wrong. I'm off my nut to-day-that's all. I've discovered that I -- Well, I guess I cared a lot more for the girl than I thought I did. By God, I believe I loved her. It is hell-having her clear gone. But my hanging for her murder isn't going to do her any good; not now."

Horrified, I backed away from him. For one wild moment I thought that the man was confessing to me.

"No! " he said. "Not that! I swear to God I'm innocent. But they are going to try to pin it on me, and they may not have much trouble doing it. I want to make a bargain with you. You'll get the best of it, for I know damn well that I'm innocent, and I don't think that you are-entirely. It is this. If you'll keep your mouth shut, I'll keep mine shut. Fifty-fifty. Will you do it?"

"Hubert Hand," I said, "I don't know one solitary thing about you that would be of any importance if I told it to the world. Anything that you think you know about me, I'm glad and willing to have you broadcast, or publish in the papers."

"Sure of that? Sure you are willing to have me broadcast that you found the body; that you didn't scream; that you stayed there, quiet and alone with it for ten minutes, before you gave the alarm?"